Congrats to the winners of yesterday’s giveaway: Eric Murray, Noell Rathbun, Eric Forsyth, Joyce Garcia and Jim Kelly! This review is part of the Patheos Book Club conversation on Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s The Awakening of Hope. The Awakening of Hope (Zondervan 2012) is an important book because it calls all church communities into sharing a deeper life together. While this new book is in line with much of Jonathan’s earlier work on new monasticism, its focus on practices and its carefully… Read more

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s newest book The Awakening of Hope Paperback: Zondervan. is the book of of the month over at the Patheos Book Club. For more on the book, check out Tony Jones’ review, and more coverage at the Patheos Book Club… Watch for our review here tomorrow and for an interview with Jonathan about the book in the next print issue of The Englewood Review of Books! Today we’re giving away 3 copies of the book, 1 copy of the… Read more

This is the first in a series of reflections on the talks on Slow Church given at the Ekklesia Project Gathering at DePaul University last month. I am listening to them and taking notes in preparation for an article on Slow Church that I’m writing for Sojourners. I invite you to listen along with me… (FYI: I’m not listening to the talks in the order they were given…) A Conversation Between Kyle Childress and Stanley Hauerwas [ Click Here to… Read more

Last week I wrote an article recommending poetry as one way to help us slow down in our ever-accelerating world. This piece, “In Defense of Poetry,” was published yesterday on RELEVANT magazine’s website. (and giving credit where credit is due, this piece was inspired by Phil Kenneson’s excellent talk at the Ekklesia Project gathering last month, on which I hope to do a series of reflections here in the near future). But my editor at RELEVANT stuck a little tagline… Read more

An article that I wrote for the Huffington Post went live today… This article is a followup to my blog series here last week on lamenting the Aurora shooting… Also, if these reflections on lament have resonated with you, you should check out my friend Tripp Hudgins’ recent thoughts in the same direction… Recovering a Politics of Lament in Our Faith Communities C. Christopher Smith, Senior Editor, The Englewood Review of Books One of the most disturbing things about… Read more

Facebook is abuzz today (as it has been for over a week) with people showing their support or their distaste for Chick-Fil-A and president Dan Cathy’s recent statement of opposition to gay marriage. I’m not going to take sides here, but I do want to challenge those who identify as Christians with the question of whether boycotts are ways of engaging those with whom we disagree that fit with our call to follow in the way of Jesus? A boycott… Read more

This is the third Slow Church post in a short series about Lament and the Aurora Theater Shooting… You can read the previous posts here: [ Part I ] [ Part II ] “To learn to lament is to become people who stay near to the wounds of the world, singing over them and washing them, allowing the unsettling cry of pain to be heard.” — Chris Rice / Emmanuel Katongole RECONCILING ALL THINGS Continuing our reflection on what… Read more

This post is a follow-up to Saturday’s post on Lament and the Aurora Theater shooting. Over the last couple of days, I have realized that lament is such a foreign concept for many of us as Westerners that I might have been making too big of a leap in assuming that people knew what I meant by lament. So, I offer a few more thoughts here about what lament is and what it might mean for us to lament the… Read more

I heard about the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado as I was on my way home yesterday from a retreat with my wife. The news left me speechless; how does one respond to senseless violence on that scale? This morning, as I continued to reflect on this tragic incident, I recalled a very helpful passage in Chris Rice and Emmanuel Katongole’s recent book Reconciling All Things (Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation / IVP Resources for Reconciliation Series). I dug… Read more

Food is central to the vision of Slow Church, in the practices of sharing food together and also caring about where our food comes from that God so graciously and abundantly provides food for us. One of the most helpful introductory books in thinking about food in the life of the church is our friend Ragan Suttterfield’s book Farming As A Spiritual Discipline. This book was developed from three talks that Ragan gave here at Englewood Christian Church in 2008,… Read more